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Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

Guess it's time to share this again. "Cancer screening has never been shown to save lives" - Oncologist Vinay Prasad. Detection is not the problem. It's what to do once you find it. Iatrogenic harms are real.

https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.h6080

With better testing, we might be able to save some people, but we might also be subjecting a great deal more people to harms through unnecessary treatment and psychological trauma.

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You can't design interventions for problems that you cannot see. Detection alone doesn't save lives, but it is a necessary step to the discovery of interventions that do.

There's a lot to this, if you look hard enough you'll find something wrong. But that something wrong probably would have never progressed into something that kills you - however the interventions you then undergo are not without risk. Like if you have the slow-growing prostate cancer, you'll die of something else. But if you operate you're taking risks of surgery and lifetime incontinence, and might spread it elsewhere in the body.

However, I still think early detection is an important first step to finding better interventions. Once you know it's there you can start to come up with less risky/invasive treatments. The odds of dealing with it at an early stage are so much better and the scope of the intervention required so much smaller.

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